Book as URL (presentation at IDFP/Book Expo)

I was asked to present in the opening session of the IDPF conference at Book Expo as part of a panel: “The Evolving Digital Book: 4 Visionary Perspectives,” with Corey Pressman, Richard Nash and Craig Mod. The slides are below, and here is my proposal for the responsibilities of a publisher or author of a book:

A proposal:

10 Recommendations?/Dreams?/Ideas? for “the Book as URL”

A Persistent URL
Every book should have a persistent URL, something like: http://publisher.com/isbn/title-by-author

Structured Data
Every book should live as structured data online.

Provide Book Metadata
Every book should make ONIX-like top-level metadata available through an open API, eg:

cover image

title

author

descriptions (one line, 50 words, unlimited)

keywords

pub date

BISG categories

etc.

Aggregate External Metadata
Every book URL should pull in additional “external” metadata — through APIs — from external services, eg:

reviews from “official” sources + review URL

reviews from readers (goodreads, facebook,twitter)

data from libraries/librarians

external “about the book” URLs (wikipedia etc)

external “about the author” URLs (wikipedia,authors web site, etc.)

Aggregate annotations
The book should aggregate the conversation about the book:

pull in highlights & comments from open annotation systems (eg Readmill … and others who open their data up … as one hopes Kobo & Kindle will do!)

these highlights should be linked to the occurrence in the text itself (since you already have your book as structured data in the cloud)

This all may sound like fantasyland, but using a powerful book CMS (like PressBooks) makes all of this relatively easy, indeed half of it we do already, the other half we expect to roll out in the coming months.